I’ve got kind of a long drive home so on Friday I call up my good friend Matt Smith, most recently of Dr. Who fame (Matthew Dow Smith, the artist on the Dr. Who comic book series, not Matt Smith the new Dr. Who). I’ve only known Matt for a few years, but he’s one of the few people who it seems I’ve known my entire life (as opposed to many people I have known practically my whole life, of whom I often think, ‘who are you?’), especially as we seem to share a brain on nearly everything and have the sort of finish each others’ sentences, start laughing before he says the punchline types of relationship. So we give each other the quick update on life, the universe and everything and then we start our inevitable discussion about books. We‘re both book junkies. Not just reading junkies, but actual book junkies, so the discussion ranges from what we’re reading to books we’ve picked up in our travels. Matt tells me he made a foray to a used bookstore and picked up a few things, and he starts telling me which ones he’s read. And then it gets weird. Listen:Me: “Nice finds.” Then, remembering my own recent excursion to a used book store, “Hey, have you ever read anything by James Herbert?”Matt: “Other than The Magic Cottage, you mean?” he says, reminding me of a conversation we had three or four years ago. We’d both really liked The Magic Cottage.Me:“Yeah. Anything recently?”Matt: “Funny you should mention it. I picked up one of his on that outing. That was one of the first ones I started reading.”Me: “Really? When did you say you went to the book store?” Matt: “About two weeks ago.”I’d gone to the used bookstore near me two weeks ago.Me: “Um, which one was it that you got? ‘Cause if you say…”Matt: “Moon.”Me: “…I might freak.”Moon. The very James Herbert novel I’d picked up at a used bookstore two weeks ago.Me: “How much did you get it for?”“Three bucks.”I told him I’d paid a dollar, but when I looked at my copy later that night, I saw the little 3—penciled in the upper right hand corner on the frontispiece.Matt: “Well. That’s a little bizarre.”Perhaps less bizarre, we’d reached pretty much the same conclusions about the book.

Now, understand, that Moon isn’t a current NYT Best Seller—it is a twenty-five year old horror novel. Now, you might say, “Well, Dan, both you and Matt are both horror fiction geeks, so it only makes sense that you could end up reading the same book.” But that, to me, only makes it weirder. True, we are horror fiction geeks—between us we’d read a good number of Herbert’s two dozen novels. He is a pretty big name in the horror field, and so the odds of neither of us having read the book prior would seem very slim—and then to decide to read it at the same time after buying the same twenty-five year-old edition (hardcover, Herbert’s first in the U.S.) at the same time, for the same amount of money, seems weeeeeiiiird to me.

I think maybe we should start “Matt & Dan’s Psychic Book Club”. The thing is, I already know which of you want to join.

5 comments:

wow thats awesome i nearl had a panick attack when you said matt smith lol !! me and my friend gemma are phsycicly connected we always know everything about eachother and this is the wierd part if she needs to eat or burp or somthing i can do it for her !! its so awesome lmao

Hi Dan,It was so great to meet you after the book signing at Books of Wonder. (This is the intern that tagged along, by the way.) I just thought I'd drop by to say that I picked up the YA Suggested Summer Reading List from my local branch library, and there was your book! "Generation Dead by Daniel Waters"...and I was like, "I KNOW that guy!" So cool. Hope the rest of the tour went well.